Ideas and Strategies for Real-Time Personalization

Call-to-action (CTA) buttons are essential to digital marketers everywhere. These buttons are how you lead visitors to take the actions you’d like them to take on your site. Whether you want them to download an eBook, sign up for a newsletter, request a demo, or make a purchase, a CTA button is what you use to draw the visitors’ attention and get them to click.

But every site is different, and each visitor is unique. There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all CTA button. Nuxeo, a global software company providing a cloud-native content services platform that enables organizations to manage digital content, has some experience with this.

The Challenge

Historically, Nuxeo’s messaging targeted an IT audience. CTAs were placed across the site to encourage visitors to download its software platform (an action that typically appeals to a more technical audience) and then to sign up for a free trial of its premium products and services. But the team wanted to expand their targeting to include line-of-business users as well as their traditional technical audience. Those users have different needs and want to take different actions on the site. To appeal to different people, the team needed to promote different CTAs to different audiences based on who the individual was and where he or she was in the buyer’s journey.

The Solution

While Nuxeo wanted visitors to download the platform if they desired, they also wanted to encourage visitors to request a demo or contact the company for more detailed information on pricing or product capabilities. The team tested a variety of different messages and designs to find successful campaigns that encouraged visitors to take those actions. The best performing campaign was a persistent scrolling infobar that displays three CTA buttons: “Download Nuxeo,” “Request a Demo,” and “Contact Us.” This infobar was only shown to visitors who had not yet taken any of those actions and were located in the company’s target geographies.

The persistent infobar continues to be very successful, driving an increase in engaged leads. The stats around their improvement in demand generation for this campaign and others are included in this case study.

Final Thoughts

Remember that despite all the best practices out there regarding CTA buttons, you can’t know what will work for your site until you test it. So read all the wisdom out there, but then test it all to figure your own best practices. And don’t just test it for everyone – test it with different key audience segments.

After all, a generic CTA is unlikely to be the best approach for your site, as your visitors are not all at the same stage of the journey or interested in the same content. Dynamic CTAs that change based on a person’s behavior, affinities, or in-the-moment intent can make a world of difference. Check out this blog post on how we leverage dynamic CTAs on the Evergage site to guide visitors along their journeys.

And for more on how Nuxeo leverages personalization to drive leads and improve engagement, read the full case study.